Snacks and foods

Haichuu, chocolate koala snacks, mochi ice cream, senbei (rice crackers), wasabi senbei, azuki-filled mochi, Pocky. These are some of the Japanese snacks one can find at various Asian stores in Utah. They are always fun to share and enjoy with other Japan-crazy friends. The wasabi senbei are especially entertaining – well, giving them to others is. ;)

Since arriving here, we’ve had other yummy snacks as well. Things like curry Cheetos, avocado-flavored tortilla chips, heart-shaped Genji pies, dango, wasabi-flavored Kit-Kats (strange, but I did like them), various cold gelatins with the arrival of summer, azuki-filled buns of all sorts, tons of interesting wafers and cookies with names I can’t read, etc.

Regretfully, I have not branched out much to try new foods (we just get things that are easy to cook). We have eaten some Japanese Italian here – pizzas with seaweed or shrimp or tuna and bacon on them. That was interesting, but also good! We had Japanese Thai the other night. Also good. We have yet to go out to eat anywhere else, so not much to say about that.

At school I eat the lunches served there. Japanese meals are much more focused around rice and vegetables. A very good idea, I think! Meat is good, but in small portions. School lunch gives me a chance to be a little more adventurous where food is concerned. One of the many new food adventures I’ve had includes a certain snack. This snack was the strangest snack of them all so far, and was considered a dessert. It consists of sardines mixed with slivered almonds.

Sound gross? Well, it looks more gross:

I don’t know the name of this strange snack, but I’ll tell you it was certainly frightening to pick up the little snack package and know I was expected to eat it because that’s what you do with school lunches. Teacher and student alike, even if there’s something you don’t like, you eat it!

I watched the kids in that day’s lunch group happily tear open their own packages and start eating the almonds and little fish. I started thinking, ‘Well, if kids like this snack, how bad can it be?' Many of them even started playing janken (rock, scissors, paper) for each others' fish, disappointed when they got a piece of almond instead!

So, not wanting to act like a ridiculous foreigner even more than I already do, I opened my snack and poured out a fish and a few almonds, and stuck them in my mouth. First, I got the taste of fish. Just fishy fish. Luckily, I don’t mind fish. The problem came when it was time to chew. The thought of the whole fish – tiny as it is – in my mouth grossed me out.  I stopped thinking about it, braced myself, and began to chew.

Long story short, I ate my entire snack package. Well, no, that’s a lie. One girl in the lunch group I was with really really liked the fish, so I gave her one because her friend kept teasing her and giving her only almonds even after saying she’d give her a fish. Anyway, we’ve had them twice now at school lunch time, and I’ve eaten them both times. They actually aren’t horrible. Not something I’d willingly buy and snack on at home, but not horrible. Too fishy, I think – more almonds would make it tastier. They’re also kind of sweet, and I do like sweet with salt.

But still, there’s something about eating whole fish that just kind of grosses me out….